MrBiffo

TOP TIER EXCLUSIVE: DIGITISER HISTORY REDISCOVERED!

Added 2022-01-20 14:55:05 +0000 UTC

I thought about sharing this in the new Writer's Club tier, but this is as much a part of Digitiser history as anything. Basically, we've hired a skip and are having a clear out to make way for the inevitable stuff we'll accrue for Digi Level 2. In the process, Sanja found a bunch of my old scripts and whatnot, which I'll be sharing with the Writer's Club members (just a tenner a month, if you want to upgrade your sub!) over the coming weeks and months, along with my thoughts.

But the script above was written while I was still at Digi, with Tim "Mr Hairs" Moore, and I thought more of you might want to see it.

In short, prior to Tim being fired, we had already both begun thinking about life after Digi. We'd loved working together - particularly writing the annual Pant-Ohs - so we thought we'd give writing scripts a go.

What happened is that the first script we ever wrote somehow got optioned by Planet 24 (for the princely sum of £250 each). It never got made... but we wrote a couple of other scripts together (also never got made), then Tim signed a book deal and I had to go it alone.

Then a few years later, Robert "Friday Night Dinner" Popper - who had read and optioned my first script with Tim - recommended me to the producer of Sooty. By which point, I had become so disillusioned with how many rejections I'd had, I'd more or less given up. And that's how my TV writing career began, and why I ended up writing for kids TV.

So anyway, here's a chunky except of We Two Vets, the first script Tim and I wrote (most of it in the offices at Teletext, when we were meant to be doing other stuff). We wrote it for radio, but even then we didn't really have a clue what we were doing. It's basically just an extended Digi Pant-Oh, about two vets - one evil (Faustus) and one stupid (David Belt).